Engineering & Mining Journal

AUG 2017

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84 E&MJ • AUGUST 2017 www.e-mj.com
OPERATING STRATEGIES
easily, enable authors to focus on content
rather than formatting, and provide online
access to their documentation. Absolute
Data Group's R4i product suite seems to
have met those requirements.
ADG, headquartered in Brisbane, Aus-
tralia, said its R4i suite includes tools
needed to create, manage, and leverage
information that is vital to the operation
and maintenance of complex assets. The
integration between R4i products allows
the same information to be used across
various areas of a business consistent-
ly and quickly. By having one source of
content, it saves both time and money,
and ensures information out in the fi eld,
during maintenance, and in training is all
changed at the same time.
"We successfully implemented the
full suite of R4i products two years ago,"
said Mackereth. "We can now produce
detailed parts and operator manuals with
minimal effort. What once took 20 hours
to complete, now only takes 8-10 hours,
from CAD output to a published manual."
Since the implementation, Maclean
Engineering has structured and published
more than 300 sets of manuals, and they
cleared their backlog of manuals in the
fi rst year. MacLean's team can now pro-
duce all documentation in XML and pub-
lish to electronic and print mediums.
"ADG's training and support has suc-
cessfully turned a group of WYSIWYG
authors into XML protégés," said Mack-
ereth. "This alone has opened up several
options to us to further increase the reus-
ability of our information."
MacLean's customers are embracing
the capabilities of the interactive elec-
tronic technical publications (IETPs) they
are provided. Many are interested in con-
verting all of their older documentation to
the new system.
"Our customers continue to see the
benefi ts of our decision to go with ADG over
many other options that were available to
us. The quality of the products and the ex-
ceptional level of service we always receive
have validated our decision. The feedback
from customers on our interactive electron-
ic parts manuals has been excellent."
Reaping the Benefi ts
ADG CEO Tammy Halter said many com-
panies can achieve the same benefi ts
from R4i as MacLean Engineering.
"Benefi ts can be gained in data plan-
ning and management, authoring and de-
livery. By utilizing an S1000D-compliant
database, our CSDB, at the core of the
system, data can be exchanged and re-
used more easily and common data can be
identifi ed," said Halter. "This not only in-
creases data integrity, but generates more
consistent documentation. For example,
information that is updated in an opera-
tor's manual is also updated in the related
training manual and maintenance manual.
"This can reduce update costs by 30%.
Output errors only need to be fi xed once,
and fl ow on. Authors also have an easy roll
back to previous versions of content."
MacLean Engineering believes the
speed of publishing and the cost savings
gained from reusing content have been
the greatest benefi ts. "We receive our data
from CAD CAM systems and automatically
import that into the CSDB, for multi-re-
purpose across customers and across de-
livery types. We would reuse about 75%
of our content, in terms on data modules
and images," said Mackereth.
"That's a huge saving to our business,
when we have more than 42,000 mod-
ules and more than 125,000 images in
our database. It also delivers exceptional
benefi ts to our customers in terms of pub-
lishing speed.
"We are now completing the creation
and population of around 300 modules
that can be used to create any one of 61
different English operator manuals for our
equipment," said Mackereth. "The next
step is to duplicate that effort for both
French and Spanish. But the most excit-
ing development is our foray into creating
standardized e-learning for both mainte-
nance and operating instructions for our
customers. It's the obvious next step in
reusing our data."
Monitor
Lube Oil Flows in
Crushers & Mills
248-542-9635
www.flowmeters.com
ufm@flowmeters.com
Legendary
Reliability
After converting its manual preparation process to use Absolute Data Group's R4i information management system,
Maclean saw its typical manual publishing time requirement drop by half.